Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna had a good command of watercolor painting techniques and created many landscapes, still lives and genre sketches. ‘Winter View’ is one of her works presented in the exposition of the Palace Complex of the Oldenburgs. The exact year of its creation is unknown: the Grand Duchess could have painted it between 1920 and 1928. In that small painting, she depicted snow-covered brick fence posts with decorative gray-green flower pots. Posts are braid with the scapes of a climbing plant that are almost completely hidden under the snow. A rod with a donut planted on it is stuck into the snow, and two titmice are curling around it: apparently, the delicacy was left on the street especially for them. A snow-covered group of trees is on the background of the paining, with a light plank bridge between them. There is the artist’s signature “Olga” with a stroke below in the lower right corner of the painting.
In this work, Olga Aleksandrovna used the technique of multi-layer painting or glaze - she made every subsequent layer of watercolor lighter and more transparent than the previous one. That technique made it possible to more accurately convey the play of light and shadow, as well as the color nuances of various objects in the drawing, the transparency of the air and the shades of snow.
The Grand Duchess probably captured in this work the porch of the Hvidøre House near Copenhagen, where the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna lived in exile. Her sister Aleksandra and she purchased that small villa in 1907, following the death of their father, King Christian IX of Denmark. Their own palace allowed the sisters to feel relatively independent and to have their own housing even in emigration, and not to visit relatives.
Her grandson Tikhon Kulikovskiy lived in Vidore together with the dowager empress. He recalled: “At the winter from 1927 to 1928, we did not leave for Copenhagen, because doctors felt that the Empress was too weak to move.” Perhaps that year Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna also stayed there, and at that time she painted “Winter View” from nature.
In this work, Olga Aleksandrovna used the technique of multi-layer painting or glaze - she made every subsequent layer of watercolor lighter and more transparent than the previous one. That technique made it possible to more accurately convey the play of light and shadow, as well as the color nuances of various objects in the drawing, the transparency of the air and the shades of snow.
The Grand Duchess probably captured in this work the porch of the Hvidøre House near Copenhagen, where the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna lived in exile. Her sister Aleksandra and she purchased that small villa in 1907, following the death of their father, King Christian IX of Denmark. Their own palace allowed the sisters to feel relatively independent and to have their own housing even in emigration, and not to visit relatives.
Her grandson Tikhon Kulikovskiy lived in Vidore together with the dowager empress. He recalled: “At the winter from 1927 to 1928, we did not leave for Copenhagen, because doctors felt that the Empress was too weak to move.” Perhaps that year Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna also stayed there, and at that time she painted “Winter View” from nature.
